Rakudo Star Release 2015.11 (now in beta!)

2015-11-28

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to announce the November 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the November 2015 release is available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language ("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as "Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2015.11 of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2015.11 of MoarVM, plus various modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the Perl 6 community.

Some of the new compiler features since the ast Rakudo Star release include:

There is now an infix:<.> operator that does method calls with slightly looser precedence than the postfix unary method call.

New operator infix o for function composition

fc for Unicode-correct case folding implemented

grep now accepts :k, :v, :kv, :p attributes

Supply.throttle for rate-limiting

Array.push is now used for pushing one element (mostly); Array.append exists for pushing multiple values. Same for unshift/prepend

Basic arithmetic operations (+, *, -, /) on Range objects that shift or scale the end points while maintaining exclusions

The v notation now allows alphabetic components: v1.2.beta. (Incompatible because method calls on a version must be protected by \ or () now.)

use v6b+; notation is now recognized and enforced

Many built-in methods that return iterables are now much faster

Better error messages when comparing version strings with numbers

Several error messages that were lacking line numbers now include them

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases. Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A Perl 6 tutorial is available as docs/2015-spw-perl6-course.pdf in the release tarball.